Natural gas has emerged as one of the preferred alternative fuels for vehicles owing to its advantages of abundant reserves, cleaner combustion and lower cost. At present, the gas supply methods for natural-gas engines are mainly port fuel injection (PFI) and direct injection (DI). The transient injection characteristics of a gas fuel injection device, as the terminal executive component of the PFI or DI mode, will directly affect the key performance of a gas fuel engine. Therefore, gas fuel injection devices have been selected as the research object of this paper, with a focus on the transient injection process. To explore the impacts of valve vibration amplitude, period, frequency and velocity on transient injection characteristics, one transient computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model for gas fuel injection devices was established. The findings thereof demonstrated that there is a linear relationship between the instantaneous mass flow rate and instantaneous lift during the vibration process. However, this relationship is somewhat impacted when the valve speed is high enough. A shorter valve vibration period tends to preclude a shorter period of flow-hysteresis fluctuation. The near-field pressure fluctuation at the throat of an injection device, caused by valve vibration, initiates flow fluctuation.

Gas fuel direct injection (DI) technology can improve the control precision of the in-cylinder mixing and combustion process and effectively avoid volumetric efficiency reduction in a compressed natural gas (CNG) engine, which has been a tendency. However, compared with the port fuel injection (PFI) method, the former’s mixing path and duration are shortened greatly, which often leads to poor mixing uniformity. What is worse, the in-cylinder mixing performance would be seriously affected by engine working conditions, such as engine speed and load. Based on this situation, the fluid mechanics software FLUENT is used in this article, and the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of the injection and mixing process in a gas-fueled direct injection engine is established. A quantitative evaluation mechanism of the in-cylinder mixing performance of the CNG engine is proposed to explore the influencing rule of different engine speeds and loads on the mixing process and performance. The results indicate that phase space analysis can accurately reflect the characteristics of the mixture mixing process. The gas fuel mixture rapidly occupies the cylinder volume in the injection stage. During the transition stage, the gas fuel mixture is in a highly transient state. The diffusion stage is characterized by the continuous homogenization of the mixture. The in-cylinder mixing performance is linearly dependent on the engine’s working condition in the phase space.